Calendaring and scheduling programs enable users to manage events, schedule resources, and schedule meetings between multiple people. Difficulties may arise when meetings are to be scheduled between people who do not use or have access to the same calendaring and scheduling program. The situation may be further complicated when it is not known in advance what calendar client is being used by the recipient of a meeting communication (e.g. a meeting request or invitation). Further, meeting communication recipients may change calendaring and scheduling clients while meeting communications are still being exchanged between invitees, for example when a user switches between clients when switching user terminals (e.g. home and office).
Some calendar data exchange standards, such as the Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification (iCalendar) defined in RFC 2445, allow users to send meeting requests and tasks to another users through emails. The iCalendar standard defines a Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) message format for communicating meeting requests and responses. Recipients of an iCalendar email with supporting software can respond to the sender (originator) by return email by accepting the meeting request or by counter-proposing a meeting with a different date, time, place, etc. The iCalendar standard describes the format of calendar-based data, however it does not describe how to process and handle that data. Accordingly, other protocols and standards are typically needed to manage this data. For example, a related standard is iCalendar Transport-Independent Interoperability (iTIP) which defines a protocol for exchanging iCalendar objects for the purposes of group calendaring and scheduling between users. Another related standard is iCalendar Message-based Interoperability Protocol (iMIP) which defines a standard method for implementing iTIP on standard Internet email-based systems.
Many but not all calendaring and scheduling programs are compliant with the iCalendar standard. For example, some calendaring and scheduling programs use proprietary email message headers which are not compatible with the iCalendar standard such as Lotus Notes™ from IBM Corporation,.
Thus, there remains a need for an improved method and system for generating and processing electronic meeting communications that will be compatible with different calendaring and scheduling clients applications.
It will be noted that throughout the appended drawings, like features are identified by like reference numerals.